Tenement houses at the western end of Ulica Prózna
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"Our street, the haunt of thousands of Jews, one of hundreds of Jewish streets of Warsaw which would become heaps of bones and mounds of ruins". David Canaani, a resident of Nowolipki Street |
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These pre-war houses at the corner of Ulica Prózna (Prózna Street) and Plac Grzybowski (Grzybowski Square) were located within the Small Ghetto. The eastern wall of the ghetto cut north-south through Prózna Street a short distance east of these buildings. The larger photograph is looking roughly north, the smaller roughly east.
The houses were built between 1880 and 1900. The ground floors were used as shops selling, amongst other things, ironware and machine belts. There are still shops and workshops here today.
One early resident was Zalman Nozyk, who founded the Twarda Street synagogue.
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The Polish Tenement House Built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, Polish tenement houses were situated around one or more courtyards, called "boxes". They were three to five storeys high and socially mixed, with the richer inhabitants living at the front and the poorer inhabitants living towards the back. Even in houses with exclusively Jewish tenants the janitor would be a gentile. David Caanani, who lived in such a house, described it thus: "There was a staircase at each corner [of the courtyard], apart from the wider and more elegant entrances to the street ... Almost all the apartments consisted of two rooms and a kitchen, a small hallway in which the toilet was hidden behind a screen of planks, and where a laundry basket and all sorts of junk could be found as well. Apartments of this kind were considered respectable and well arranged." For a good impression of social divisions in a gentile apartment house read the Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus' short story The Waistcoat in The Sins of Childhood & Other Stories (Northwestern University Press, 1996) In September 1939 'house committees' were set up in Warsaw apartment houses. These consisted of a few individuals prepared for emergencies and ready to assist tenants and refugees. Such committees operated in gentile and Jewish houses, as well as houses with mixed occupancy. Most such committees ceased to exist after Poland's defeat. Emanuel Ringelblum, however, kept the committees operating within the ghetto, under the guidance of the Self-Help organisation. At one point 2,000 Jewish houses had such committees, though the system fell apart as the ghetto shrank. For further images of tenement houses see Ulica Waliców and 20 Chlodna. |